It's next to the one labeled "syringes." Take a peek inside the laboratory with Malibu's mad scientist.

There's a strip mall in Malibu. The surf crashes right across the highway. At the RadioShack, Eric the audio geek helps me select a new microcassette recorder. He asks what I'm up to. I tell him I'm interviewing a guy.

"Who?" he asks. "I don't want to be pushy."

"It's okay," I shrug. "It's Nick Nolte."

"Cool--why didn't you say so? He comes in here all the time hunting parts for his microscope. Science is his thing. He's got a big microscope."

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Nolte's rural six-acre compound is a few miles north of RadioShack, back in the hills, away from the ocean. I push a buzzer, the gate opens, and I drive in. Lush grounds, a canopy of trees. A couple houses on the property. Gardeners everywhere. A big yellow Lab with a plastic megaphone around its neck bounds out of the main house. The doors to the house are open. I follow the dog inside.

Nolte is standing in the center of a large room, wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt and wide-striped Calvin Klein pajama bottoms. He's barefoot. Face tanned and lined, eyes sunk in. Strong neck. Lean as a bull rider. His hair is the same tawny color as the Labrador's and flies back over his ears and floats above his forehead and down into his eyes. He peers through his hair at me, and there is an energy to those eyes, a crazy vitality. He is mixing a little something in a small cup, a brown potion, looks earthy. There's a dropper and a spoon and he's stirring and then he drinks it down. I wait for him to say something. But he just looks at me. Finally, I shake his hand and say, "Congratulations on the Nobel prize. Can we talk about your latest science project?"

Up the stairs we tramp, through a construction zone of plastic walls with zippers, sawhorses, and power saws, into a massive, high-ceilinged upper room that looks over a garden. This is his bedroom and laboratory. A schoolboy's dream of a room. A Buddha watches over the large, book-strewn bed. Naked women with trumpets adorn lamps. Another dog comes in and sniffs us out. And then there it is, in an alcove where he does his work: a vintage, professional-grade Ortholux microscope.

He looks at me and growls, voice deep as a lion's. "You'll have to get over that if you want to do blood work."

He pricks his finger, squeezes a drop of his blood. "We don't want the first drop. We want to get down a little deeper." He squeezes again, a second perfect drop onto a glass slide, which he slips under the microscope. "Our blood tells us everything. By watching your blood, you become connected to yourself in a way that you have never before been connected." He's flipping switches. Light passes through the iris, illuminating the blood cells. The picture is projected on a nearby monitor.

"Yes, yes, that's it!" He's pointing to cells moving on the screen. "Here's a real good cell structure, perfectly round. When you're young, the red cells are plump and shimmering--that's what you want." He points out a dying cell. "I've watched my blood degenerate over twenty-four hours. You'll actually see long strings of bacteria coming out of them as they decay." He lingers on the word decay, giving it a couple more syllables.

The blood cells are quite beautiful, but all of a sudden the microscope is smoking. It's like a magnifying glass that has been left in the sun and now there's fire inside. "Whoa," he says, surprised, blowing at the smoke. "Whoa! Who's been messing with this?"

He tries to close the iris, but it's too hot. "We're screwed," he says. "Oh, shit!" He might have burned himself a little. "Oh, Aidan, Aidan, what have you done?" he moans. The smoke starts up again. Small puffs of it, like smoke signals.

"Brawley!" Nolte bellows, calling his twelve-year-old son.

Brawley is in a room across the hall, and I'm sent to hunt him down. I unzip the plastic sheeting and walk into the space that Brawley calls his cave. He and his best friend, Aidan, are hunched over separate computers playing EverQuest. The game takes nine hours to cross a virtual landscape. The room is pitch-black except for the glowing monitors, and it's throbbing, incredibly loud. I have to shout to get their attention.

The microscope is still smoldering as the boys shuffle into the lab, wanting to know what happened. They crowd around Nolte's shoulders, looking at it.

"Somebody's been on this while I was out of the house," Nolte says. "That is my paranoid conclusion." He looks at Aidan, a chubby kid with acne, a real whiz kid, who says, "I get blamed for everything around here. I could be fifty miles away and you'd still blame me."

Aidan is the son of Brawley's shrink. They met when Aidan's dad was trying to help Brawley cope with Nick's divorce from Brawley's mom six years ago. Then the shrink himself got divorced, and now the two boys are best friends. Sometimes Aidan sleeps on the floor next to Brawley's bed.

The boys want to check out the iris of the microscope, and Nolte cuts a flashlight on. "Maybe it's an aging problem," Aidan says. They all peer through the smoke at the inner workings. Even though Nolte is fifty-eight, and Brawley and Aidan are twelve and thirteen, the three confer like colleagues, and that is, in truth, the relationship. They hang out here, for weeks sometimes, without visitors, plotting new science projects, along with Nolte's girlfriend, the comedic actress Vicki Lewis. The compound is tricked out with ten computers, each with a large color monitor, and Nolte has his own Internet server. To Brawley and Aidan, he's just Nick. No big deal. He's a grown-up kid with a credit card and the best toys.

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But his blood work has been interrupted, and his frustration is beginning to show. He doesn't want to scold, doesn't want to accuse, because Brawley's a good kid, and he's still working out this postdivorce relationship. Anyway, you can't yell at them, because if you yell, they'll just sneak around and do bad-boy things. Aw, hell. "Maybe I shouldn't let the two of you in here for a while," Nolte says. "Let's shut it down for now, let it cool down."

"We should test his blood type!" Brawley suggests.

Yes! Let's test his blood type! Nolte is immediately back in motion. Suddenly, all three of them are looking at me hungrily.

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Aidan swabs my fingertip with alcohol. "This will hardly hurt at all," he says. "Wanna hear a joke? Something to get your mind off it? Okay, how many blonds can you fit into a van? I mean--oh, shit, that's not it. I mean, four blonds die in a minivan--what's the tragedy?"

He pricks my finger, and Nick squeezes a drop of blood onto the test strip.

"The van could've held eight!" Aidan cries.

Nolte says, "Brawley, Aidan, read this to me. What's the protocol?"

"Um, protocol," Aidan says. "Step one, okay, mix in for thirty seconds, rub it across the thing for thirty seconds."

Brawley studies how the blood instantly starts breaking up, like red paint left in the rain. "I betcha it's A negative," he says. "Me and Aidan are the same type. A negative."

As he waits for the results, Nolte looks over at the wreckage of the microscope, flipping switches again, and says, "It's absolutely broken. Now I'm frustrated." He breathes. Maintain. He's not going to yell. He knows it can get fixed, damage can be repaired--that's one of the things he's learned. You just have to go to the expert. He knows a guy who can fix it, but still, he's feeling a little jangled. Meanwhile, Brawley was right. I'm A negative.

Nolte pushes away from the microscope. "Who wants a shot of B-12?" he asks.

No, thank you, I say. My needle problem. Maybe coffee? Or a drink?

"No, no!" he says. "This is better."

There is a small, gray medical cabinet on his desk. One drawer labeled syringes. Another drawer tourniquets. He takes out a narrow-gauge needle.

"Don't worry," Brawley says. "He does this all the time."

Every night, for instance, before he goes to bed, Nolte fills a syringe with .5cc of human growth hormone, which is generally illegal unless you are a dwarf, and shoots it into his stomach. Someday, he figures, we'll all just take a pill, encoded with all the testosterone and hormones our body needs, guided toward specific tissues, to retard aging. Until then, he'll keep buying on the underground market. "All the old hippies are doing it now," he says. A lot of corporate executives. "If Charlie Rose and Larry King aren't on human growth hormones," he says, laughing, "they're thinking about it. I guarantee you, they all want to keep a step ahead of the competition.

"And if I'm feeling a little stressed," Nolte says, "I'll come in and shoot a little B with a little pull of folic acid, which is good for the heart, and a little B-12."

In North Dallas Forty, he played an over-the-hill football player who shoots painkillers into his knee. "I like needles," the brokendown ballplayer declared. "Anything to keep me in the game."

"Nothing to it," Nolte says. When he's really stressed or feeling depleted, he fills an IV bag with thirteen different vitamins and minerals, puts a tourniquet around his arm, and drips them through a needle into his bloodstream. The procedure takes more than an hour, and he figures he does it several times a week, often while in bed.

Well, I guess a little B-12 never hurt anyone. I offer my right arm, but he waves it off. "Need your right butt cheek, just off the hip." He swabs me with alcohol. The needle doesn't go in readily, and he's got to jab it in a second time. Right into muscle. The boys are watching me, and I try not to wince, but the damn needle stings, and immediately I feel the stuff hit my bloodstream. My forehead warms. My feet tingle. An incredible humming rush for about a minute. I'm feeling a little light-headed, I tell Nolte.

"Man, he doesn't look good," Brawley says.

You sure you only put B-12 in there? I ask.

The room has begun to spin, and the boys ease me down onto the floor, where I rest on a round Feldenkrais mat, which feels like a soft, white buoy. I am quite woozy and sweating, and I hear something strange emanating from somewhere--I'm not sure where--a singsongy, possibly computer-generated voice. A very pleasant, clipped voice. Sad Man, a life-sized papier-mâché figure, is seated near the bed, his head bowed in a posture of sadness. Nolte pats Sad Man on the head as he passes. Books are strewn about--scientific journals, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Better Sex Through Chemistry. From this angle I also see Nolte is filling up another syringe for himself, mixing a vitamin cocktail, holding it above his head, thumping it, squinting. Nolte pulls down his pajamas a bit on one side, exposing a few inches of skin, from his waist to his right cheek, a lean flank for a guy almost sixty.

When the room stops spinning, the boys help me up, each taking an arm.

"I could give you some ozone," Nolte says. "It will make you feel better."

Ozone? Like the hole?

"This works. I can prove it to you. Bad things can't live in it. Viruses can't live in it, bacteria can't. Cancer can't. Gets more oxygen into your plasma. It's all about getting oxygen into your brain. Everything I do is about getting more oxygen. Need oxygen."

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He sits me down. There's a cylinder the size of a standard fire extinguisher bolted to the wall, next to the microscope. He hands me a tube with a nosepiece at the end. "Here, take this." I stick the two soft tubes up my nostrils and breathe deeply, holding this stuff in and, man, is it a buzz. Buzz.

"Have a cigarette," he says, handing me a Marlboro. "The ozone'll scrub the nicotine before it gets into your system."

It's illegal, he tells me, to claim that ozone has medical benefits, but he's convinced it's changed his life, and he's got tanks of it bolted to walls in rooms all over the property. Next to the toilet, in the gym, in his office, in the greenhouse. "If you write 'Nolte uses ozone for medical use,' they may come asking," he says. "They may not. But I'm telling you it works."

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He turns to Brawley. "Anybody else need some B-12?"

"Nah, I'll have some raspberries," says Brawley.

"Raspberries! Strawberries! Great idea!" Nick yelps. "C! We need vitamin C!" Sometimes he'll just stand out there in his berry patch and eat until he's full, a whole meal. It is late in the afternoon, the golden hour, and this will be Nolte's first meal of the day. And so there he goes, enraptured, the energy of a child, all action, pushing down the hall and out the door and into the garden to pick some plump, juicy organic fruit.

TO KILL A NEURON, Nolte says, you really have to go at it. A night out with amphetamines just won't do it. "You've gotta do amphetamines and maybe some heroin and then a couple of gallons of vodka and then Drano."

And then you pay a doctor to take a nuclear brain scan so that you can see what you have done. Before us is Nolte's brain. Floating in the glowing yellows and reds are islands of neurons that are dead or misfiring. This is the brain of an actor.

When Nolte's doctor first saw this scan, he wanted to know if he'd ever been knocked out. "Well, doc," Nolte said, "I was an alcoholic; there was drug use." The doctor said, "Well, you've experienced the equivalent of blunt trauma."

There has been quite a lot of damage, he says. Nolte honors the damage, and he considers it a gift, a special knowledge. There's a black binder on the table. It's a three-ring binder labeled confidential, and it contains the story of Nick Nolte's life. It's a rather clinical story, in black and white and X ray and MRI and brain scan and full-body nuclear PET scan in living color. It is sort of the scrapbook of this whole Nolte reclamation project, which is what his life in the last decade or so has become. This black binder is one of many such binders in Nolte's house. He analyzes and thinks and collects the effects of every character that he plays. To build a real character, it pays to understand his damage. This particular binder, the confidential one, is really just the dossier on another character. Most people don't have such a detailed accounting of their own dysfunctions, their failures, their fuckups, their rate of decay, and their halting human efforts in the face of such. Most people would just rather not know how they stack up against the inevitable. But of course, most people have not had as much of a god's hand in willfully accelerating their own demise as Nick Nolte has, and if a man has the power to find the violence inside to harm himself and bring on the end, then he must surely, Nolte feels, be able to find the grace to reverse the process.

It is, at the very least, an interesting hobby.

"Here's the blunt trauma," he says, pointing to dark areas on the brain scan, which is otherwise a gorgeous swirl of color. His fingers are stained from the strawberries.

To increase Nolte's brain function, his doctor prescribed the same treatment that Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, used to jump-start his own brain after he had a stroke: sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, the kind they stick divers into when they have the bends. Nolte spent ten hours in one. The goal was to push oxygen into his plasma so that it would be picked up by the brain and metabolized, and where once had been darkness and stupor and death would be bright colors and vitality and life. A new brain.

Like a schoolboy who's just won the prize, he hands me another brain scan taken after these sessions. "See how these yellow streaks don't shoot clear out to the sides anymore? That means the surface is metabolizing." The dark areas are now blue and yellow. Neurons, he says. Neurons that are firing.

"I've had some success." He flips to a chart. "It means my body is almost daily repairing everything that's damaged. And you never can get to zero, because life itself means a certain amount of destruction. You have to use things up in order to live."

Flipping through the black binder, we stop on a recent psychiatric workup, and I read the following aloud:

Results suggest that the patient possesses traits associated with histrionic, narcissistic, and antisocial qualities, which indicate that the patient may seek reassurance or approval from others or may be uncomfortable in situations where he or she is not the center of attention. He may react to criticism with feelings of humiliation. His personality requires attention from others, and he may have a sense of self-importance. His personality type also tends to be a rule-breaker.

The patient's attention as assessed was found to be abnormal. Results indicate anxiety-induced attention deficit, which he committed several times, in the second, third, and fourth quarters of the test. This is also indicative of anxiety or impulsivity.

Notable: He has very rapid brain speed. Approximately at age forty, with a voltage of 5.03, which may cause him to be prone to addiction. His memory is in the very superior range--no doubt this aids him as an actor.

"All true," he says.

Nick Nolte is indeed an actor. And he says that in those years when he was working away at destroying himself with the drugs and the alcohol, he was taking some roles that in their way were destroying him, too.

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You see, big movies are toxic. Of course, just because movies are small doesn't make them good. But Nolte is a constant; he is ever present. Whatever role he undertakes, there he'll be, digging, digging, going deep, trying to find something, trying to talk to ghosts. These movies, he says--whether last year's Affliction, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, or Mother Night, or a pair of new ones, Simpatico, from the Sam Shepard play, and Breakfast of Champions--they are having the same effect as the ozone. If he chooses them, breathes them in, lives them, they will restore him, cleanse him, clear out the bad stuff, all those movies he shot for $7 million apiece--I Love Trouble, Mulholland Falls, Blue Chips--that led him to a heart murmur in the early nineties. And so he's sucking them in, these little movies, because they are like a drug, and if he had to make Yet Another 48 Hours, it just might take him around the bend. Eddie Murphy told him that he wanted to do what Nolte was doing, those artistically satisfying, small, gritty movies. Nolte told him he'd have to cut his salary. "Oh, man, I can't do that," Murphy said. "I have my needs."

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Now Nolte beckons me into the bathroom. "You want some tea?" he says, waving me in. "This is the best tea. Made in China." We troop into the bathroom, Brawley and Aidan following. The computers have crashed, the server's down, and the boys are at loose ends. Nolte brews the tea on a bureau across from the shower. A tank of ozone is bolted to the wall next to the toilet. He hands me a framed mug shot of himself. Nabbed by the feds at twenty for selling draft cards. Got a forty-five-year sentence, suspended. A felon, he's never voted.

It's a large bathroom, with a huge tub in one corner, a deep, splendid tub with a Jacuzzi. Laminated script pages from his upcoming film are stacked next to the tub. Every morning, he comes in here, turns on the Jacuzzi, and reads his pages. When he was preparing for The Thin Red Line, he'd soak in here and yell, Move those damn troops! Take that goddamn hill! Pajamas are scattered on the floor. All over the room-- in fact, all over this house--are quotes that serve as affirmations, trying to buck Nolte up. One on the bathroom wall reads: "Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are, and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty, and anxious." Nolte thinks it's from Krishnamurti, but he's not sure. The twelve steps of AA are taped to the wall, at his left elbow when he's in the tub. The page is mottled and water-stained. He used to go to meetings regularly, but it wasn't quite enough. Then he discovered science. Now Scotch-taped floor to ceiling on the shower door are pages and pages of large-type definitions from a book on brain chemistry--addiction and craving brain and inescapable stress and so on.

It's dark outside now. The room is illuminated only by a small penlight that Nolte is holding. There is a window above the tub. A large gray-and-white cat with white-socked feet is on the roof, staring into the window. "Coyotes have been trying to ambush him for years," Brawley says. "So he lives on the roof." Nolte opens the window and calls out, "Kitty, kitty, kitty, come in, man, come in." The cat rubs up against Nolte's hand. It's very big. Nolte steps into the empty bathtub, picks the cat up off the roof, and hands it to me. "He's real affectionate," Nolte says.

Brawley and Aidan vanish into their cave, hoping to get back on-line. I follow Nick down the wide, wooden stairs, carrying the cat, its claws sinking deep into my arm. I am hearing water trickling. I look to the ceiling. The Labrador, its tail banging the wall, comes around the corner. The cat is holding on to my forearm for dear life. Now the floor is wet all around our feet, and we're slipping our way down the stairs. I feel wetness running down my pants. The cat has been pissing straight out into the air. Nolte now looks down for the first time and sees the puddle he's standing in.

"Oh, Jesus, who pissed all over the place?"

"It wasn't me," says Aidan, sticking his head out of the cave. "I need your credit-card number. Brawley and I found plans for an ultralight on the Internet."

"You know where the card is," Nolte says.

The cat leaps from my arms and runs. Nolte crouches down with a towel and is sopping up the mess. He looks up at my pee-stained khakis. "Looks like you're going to need some pajamas," he says.

He bounds up the stairs and tosses some down. They are like his, soft, with white piping. I put them on and wait for him to come back. A few minutes later, he slowly descends the stairs, rubbing his butt and screwing up his face a little.

"Had to give myself another hit of B-12."

EATING SLIPS HIS MIND SOMETIMES. It is midnight and, save for a handful of berries, he hasn't eaten. I am faint from hunger.

"You hungry?" he asks.

He pulls on a flimsy pair of canvas shoes, gets us each a small flashlight, picks up a basket. "To the garden!" he says. "I'll cook you some dinner."

The garden is ringed with garlic plants to keep rabbits and gophers out. Only one gopher has gotten past the garlic, but it's driving Nolte crazy. The holes he and the gardeners have dug on their hunt for the gopher are wide and deep enough to fit a body in, tunneling in one direction and another. "We throw poison in," he says, "and the gopher throws it back out."

Tall corn is in our faces as we hunt for tomatoes, which are flourishing between the cornstalks. Vines all around our feet. And we're looking for squash. And we keep coming upon watermelon. Nolte is on his knees, rooting around in his pajamas. "Oooooo, squash, squash, squash," he mutters to himself. "Oh, these are nice. I'll have some of these. I'll take some of those. These are butternuts. I'm gonna slice 'em and steam 'em a little bit in olive oil with some of the Vidalias."

As he's scooting down the rows, sizing up the butternuts, he's talking about this year's Academy Awards. "Everybody gets devastated," Nolte says, "or everybody gets elated, a little bit. But usually everybody gets devastated. It's horrible, it's rejection. No matter that you're one of only a few actors that have been nominated, or you're one of just a few directors--in the final analysis you're a loser. How can you be happy in that situation?

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"Listen, I was glad for Roberto Benigni, you know?" Nick says. "But it's not fun. It's never fun to lose." During the commercial break, after the best-actor award was presented, Nolte saw that Edward Norton and Ian McKellen, his fellow nominees, were no longer in their seats.

"I knew those fuckin' guys were at the bar. So I excuse myself and I find 'em, and I say, 'Motherfuckers!' And Ian says to me right off the bat, deadpan, 'You know, Nick, I don't really see why you expected to get the award. You do nothing but play yourself.' I look at Ian, who played a homosexual artist in Gods and Monsters, and I say, 'Look who's calling the kettle fuckin' black,' and then we both turn to Ed, who played a skinhead in American History X, and say, 'What'd you think? Bald head and tattoos were gonna win?' And we all just started laughing."

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Nolte sat on his hands when they honored Elia Kazan. Sean Penn is Nick's friend. Penn's dad was blacklisted. Kazan, of course, named names. "He was a great director," he says. "No question. So we would have had to do without On the Waterfront. So what?"

In another decade of his life, he'd be

having this conversation on a barstool. But we're inside now, back in the kitchen, and he's slicing up squash and Kentucky wonder beans and sautéing onions in olive oil, mixing it all with brown rice.

Not that he's an AA purist. He drank on Oscar night. "My soul needed that one," he says. "If I have that occasional drink, I can, you know, end up drinking for a day or so, but I no longer have that illusion that drinking is the only way to deal with life. And invariably, after a coupla days, the body is just aching and hurting, and the soul is in pain 'cause you're destroying it."

The food is all gone and it's 1:00 a.m. and Aidan is worrying about his pimples. "I have the next experiment!" Nolte yells, charging in from another room. He has a jar in his hands. Brawley and Aidan watch him as if he were a magician and a white rabbit might pop out of his hat at any moment. He opens the jar and begins to goop an organic mud mask on Aidan's face. Aidan recoils. "Hey, what's that?" he hollers.

Nick answers, almost tenderly. "Here, you put it on like this." He shows him by applying it to his own face. "It's good for you."

The phone rings. It's Vicki, calling from her office thirty feet away. She's been in there scissoring apart the dresses she wore on her recently canceled TV show, NewsRadio--miniskirts, pink taffeta bridesmaid's gowns. Making them into a quilt. "Come on out, baby," Nolte says. "Yeah, he's still here. It's an interview, but it evolved. You gotta come out; it's my big hurrah."

Brawley asks if it's true that there are benefits to playing video games. "Dad, since I play so many video games, I have more of those little roots. . . . What are they?"

"Dendrites," Nolte says. "The more challenged the brain is, the more dendrites it builds. They help make more connections."

Aidan pipes up. "How many do you think I have? 'Cause I do, like, problem solving every day in school. And complicated math." The mask is drying on Aidan's face, pulling his eyes apart. With the paste smeared high into his hairline, Nick looks like the fool from King Lear.

Brawley has clear skin, looks very much like his father, and has actually played Nolte as a boy in two films. He was also the kid in Ransom. "After doing Ransom," he says, "it was confusing. All of a sudden I understood who all those people were who kept stopping my dad on the street. I thought he had a lot of friends. Now I understood--you get in the movies, you get a lot of friends you don't know." He pulls me aside. "Is it true my dad won the Nobel prize?" he asks quietly.

NOLTE IS AT THE COMPUTER, a cigarette in his mouth, typing with one finger. It's the middle of the night. Aidan is right next to him at another terminal, his complexion much improved, and a panel of blinking red lights means that Brawley is in the next room, playing EverQuest. Aidan has found a medical-surplus store on-line. He's clicking through the screens, yelling out prices of used electron microscopes.

Nolte says, "We don't want to get too complicated. There are setup protocols that would take us all day."

"The way an electron microscope works," Aidan says, "is they incinerate the stuff you're sampling, and it searches for higher electrons it might give off."

"Wow, would that be fun!" Nolte says, his voice pitched high with excitement.

Nolte is working on his lines for his next movie, Trixie, with Emily Watson, in which he plays a senator falsely accused of murder. On the screen, he highlights a speech from the script, then he leans back and waits for the computer to recite it to him.

"See how she sounds?" he says. He's rubbing his forehead with a fist, eyes closed, just listening as his right hand, fingers spread wide, tilts outward, dipping and rising in concert with the voice. The voice is amplified throughout the upper room.

He used to ask friends to speak random passages from scripts into tape recorders, just to learn the words in a new way. "I'll have him punched," he repeats along with the computer, which answers, "May-I-say-I-find-you-attractive? You're-so-fresh-and-unspoiled. Is-it-okay-that-I-say-that? Does-that-scare-you-hon?"

The phone rings. It's Alan Rudolph calling from Canada, where he'll be directing Trixie, starting in a few weeks. There's the matter of a little S&M to discuss. Nolte sits and listens, pushing his hair off his forehead. He'll be shorn as the senator, hair white. "Do I literally beat her up?" he asks Rudolph. He listens for a few moments, nodding his head. "Well, that's something she and I can figure out."

Nolte is pacing in his pajamas, intense on the phone. "I think I'll have prepared well enough to be--like we did with Julie in AfterGlow with that restaurant scene--I want to be able to be that free with it so we can go anywhere we want to go. I've got the second scene, the big, long one, pretty much that free . . . and that's the one I've been really concentrating on. The other one, it's me and her, you know. It's tricky." He hangs up the phone.

He finds that as time goes by, the roles stay with him more and more. They become sort of encoded. He figures it's the way he prepares in the first place, but he can't help continuing to sort of live them after they're done. After Jefferson in Paris, he had to have his windows redone and a gazebo built to match Monticello's. After U Turn, the raven that had perched atop the shoulder of his sadistic, incestuous character stayed on here with Nick. The bird died not long ago and is buried in the yard.

In the new adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Nolte steals the movie as a cross-dressing car-lot manager.

"I designed my own dress," he says. "I told the costumer, 'It has to feel sensual. It has to be what the men don't get to wear, you know, the silk and this kind of thing.' So I took this one little dress, a sheer red dress, and I had it on and said, 'This would be good, but he'd probably like the silk to flow down here.' And then I took the dress and I spun it around backward, so the top was cut down here and the straps crossed here. Now I was bare-breasted--a Phoenician woman. That was key to the character."

He wants the dress this second. "I loved shaving my chest!" he says. He gets up off his chair to leave the lab. The computer voice croons to him, "A-woman's-sexual-temperature-is-never-lost-on-me." Dark-field photos of his sperm are on the table near the scans of his brain. He is pulling open drawers. One is filled with bottles, another with Scotch tape. He throws open the doors of a large armoire. He's saying he thinks he's found the undergarments, sheer and red. "I know it's here somewhere. I swear it! I'll find the dress!"